Question: Suppose I'm trying to send a text message to a friend. In general, I need log2(26) bits for every letter I want to send, as
Suppose I'm trying to send a text message to a friend. In general, I need log2(26) bits for every letter I want to send, as there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but if I have some information on the distribution of the letters, I can do better. For example, I might give the most common letter 'e' a shorter bit representation. It turns out the number of bits needed on average is precisely the entropy of the distribution: let us see why that is
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